Alabama is back, and it feels so right

Click to see a gallery of Alabama backstage at the Grand Ole Opry (photo: Larry McCormack/The Tennessean)

Randy Owen stood on stage at the Grand Ole Opry House and sang about what he knows.

With a voice as distinct and unwavering as when fans first heard Alabama on the radio more than 30 years ago, Owen delivered familiar lyrics about the country lifestyle — about being “born across the river in the mountains I call home” in “Tennessee River” and “rollin’ down the backwoods” with “one arm on the wheel” in “Dixieland Delight.”

Alabama launched a farewell tour in 2003. But members reunited this year to celebrate the 40th anniversary of when Owen, Teddy Gentry (on bass) and Jeff Cook (guitar and fiddle) left their small hometown of Fort Payne, Ala., and launched careers that led them to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The anniversary celebration includes a cross-country tour, a branded cruise, a tribute album called “Alabama & Friends” with new music from the group, as well as a two-night stand at the Ryman Auditorium in November, marking the first time Alabama has played a concert at the revered venue.

“It makes me sweat just thinking about it,” Owen said.

Life on Lookout Mountain

Four decades have passed, Alabama charted 43 No. 1 hits and sold more than 73 million albums, but the men still embody the simple country songs that made the band famous.

Owen and Gentry, who are cousins, and Cook made their homes fewer than five miles from each other near where they grew up.

Owen and wife Kelly still live on Lookout Mountain in the first house they built after Alabama found success. Iron gates that read “Owen” and “Feels So Right” frame the singer’s driveway.

Many animals find a home on Randy Owen’s farm in Fort Payne, Ala. He has five golden retrievers and 18 cats, including Mama Kitty, shown here relaxing at Owen’s office on the farm. Click image for more photos of Owen at his farm. (photo: Larry McCormack/The Tennessean)

The welcome committee at their home might include Owen’s five golden retrievers or some of his 18 cats, but earlier this month, it was the singer’s wife of 38 years who made the first appearance.

Kelly Owen stepped out of the back door of their home in a black cotton dress and immediately apologized for her appearance. She had been canning tomatoes from their garden. Their youngest daughter, Randa, runs their 2,000-acre farm.

Owen, who had been working at his nearby office, was soon ready to take a drive in his Ford pick-up to his favorite picnic table in Little River Canyon National Preserve near the top of the mountain.

“I want to get out like this,” Owen said. “This is where my soul is: the water, the air, the fog, my garden.”

It’s also where he retreated in 2004 at the end of the band’s sweeping farewell tour. At the time, Alabama had been recording and touring with no substantial breaks for more than 20 years.

“I think for the group to hammer and hammer day after day after day, I think it got to everybody,” Owen said. “I just think everybody needed some time. After the last show … I was, just, gosh, just so wore out. I spent the biggest part of my time in my truck … and I would go as slow as that truck would go without someone running over me for several months just to slow down.”

Alabama history

The band, called Wildcountry in its early days, started when the cousins and Cook were teenagers in the late ’60s. Owen and Gentry count those times as their favorite career moments. The trio lived together in an apartment in Bynum, Ala., for $56 a month, and it was there that the three honed their distinct three-part harmonies singing Merle Haggard songs.

Click for an interactive Alabama timeline.

Owen said he remembers getting home at night and singing the Haggard lyrics “I know I’m only Shelly’s winter love,” and Cook would “come out of a dead sleep” and hit his part.

“We … just laid there in the dark at night just singing until someone dropped out,” Gentry recalled recently backstage at the Grand Ole Opry House. “If you’re making thousands of dollars a night, it’s easy. If you’re barely making gas money and you’re wondering how you’re going to repair the washer when you get home, you’ve got to have the grit to stay together, and that’s what I admire about those other two guys.” He teared up and reached for a tissue, adding “They got grit. Enough said.”

The men made their way to Myrtle Beach, S.C., in 1973 to be the house band at The Bowery, a bar near the beach, where Owen had heard that his band could play all summer for tips.

There, the members learned how to perform and spent their time off driving to radio stations to pitch songs.

The three were still playing the bar in 1980 when they were invited to play a New Faces Show in Nashville with a handful of up-and-comers including Reba McEntire.

Owen, Gentry and Cook had to perform with the house band. Gentry thought the show was disastrous, and said he cried all the way back to Myrtle Beach. But Joe Galante — a longtime label executive at RCA Nashville — remembers the performance differently.

“They got on stage that night and blew everyone away,” Galante said. “I went back to work the next morning and called (manager) Larry McBride in and agreed to make a deal.”

Alabama’s first single with RCA, 1980’s “Tennessee River,” became its first No. 1 hit.

“One day I’m working for tips and they call from RCA and say, ‘Hey, you guys got a No. 1 song,’ ” Owen said. “We thought, ‘We’ll never have another one.’ So they booked a bunch of shows, just in case, and we thought we would go and see what happens.”

Alabama left the beach on July 12, 1980, and the band’s next 20 songs — including “Feels So Right,” “Mountain Music,” “Dixieland Delight,” “Roll On” and “Lady Down on Love” but excluding Christmas recordings — topped the charts. The band’s still-unparalleled run of No. 1 songs lasted seven years.

But Music City didn’t automatically embrace Alabama. It became the first band in the genre in which members played their own instruments and wrote their own songs. They had long hair, wore T-shirts and blue jeans on stage and had an edgier rock sound than many stalwarts in country music were accustomed.

“They were the first real rock and roll country show out there from a country standpoint,” Galante said. “There was a tradition for how things were done, and we broke the rules.”

As momentum for the band reached a peak, Owen’s personal life started falling apart. His father died while the singer was making a name for his band, and it’s something Owen still struggles with today.

Randy Owen stands at an overlook in the Little River Canyon National Preserve in his hometown of Fort Payne, Ala. (Photo: Larry McCormack/The Tennessean)

“I had left and he was feeling bad, but I had no idea he was going to die,” Owen said. “How could I have known? Some of the really incredible moments as far as the career was some of the saddest of my personal life. People want you to smile, and I wanted to get away. I needed some time, which I never got.”

The band’s career rolled on. Along the way, Alabama broke records with album and concert ticket sales and collected more country entertainer of the year trophies than any act to date.

Twenty-two years after the band notched its first No. 1 song, members were tired, they felt radio was tired of them, and to an extent, they were tired of each other. They announced plans to retire after a farewell tour, which ended in 2004, intending never to play together again.

“To be quite honest, I guess everybody got tired of Alabama,” Gentry said. “It happens to everybody. If you get lucky enough to get on that bull and ride it for eight seconds, then you’re a lucky cowboy.”

The decision to reunite, members said, can’t be narrowed down to just one reason. Owen was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010, and he said “hearing the big ‘C’ word” had a lot to do with it. (Owen received confirmation in July he is cancer free now.)

Click to see a gallery of Alabama over the years. In this photo Jeff Cook, left, Randy Owen, and Teddy Gentry of Alabama perform at the 15th annual CMA Awards show nationally televised from the Grand Ole Opry House Oct. 12, 1981. ( Ricky Rogers / The Tennessean)

Gentry admits that since he has three grandchildren about to go to college, that he needs the money to help pay for their tuition costs.

But the biggest factor was the men’s drive to help their community in 2011 after a massive tornado destroyed homes and businesses and killed 35 people in their county, and 200 more across Alabama.

“You could smell the timber,” Owen recalled of the morning after the tornado. “We stayed in our basement from 6:30 ’til around 12 that night. It was just one alarm after another.”

The band assembled a benefit concert in Birmingham, Ala., called Bama Rising. The lineup included Luke Bryan, Sheryl Crow and Brad Paisley, and the show raised more than $2.1 million.

It was the first time members of Alabama had played a set together since the final show of the farewell tour in October 2004, and Gentry said, “I guess we realized that maybe we missed the playing … and five or six years had gone by and we were like, ‘Maybe that wasn’t as bad as we remember it being.’ ”

Alabama’s 40th anniversary tour kicked off at the Alabama Theater in Myrtle Beach earlier this year, and will include 40 shows, including two in Nashville, by the time it concludes in November.

What happens after that is a question mark.

Owen is certain they will continue to play together, and Gentry thinks they will, too. It’s just the time frame that is unknown. All three are in their 60s, both Owen and Cook have had cancer, and Gentry is dealing with arthritis.

“If Jeff wants to go out and work next year, health wise, we’ll do that,” Gentry said. “And if not, we’ll get together and write a song and go fishing. I think the good Lord will carry us where he wants us, depending on our health and how we get along.”

Click to see a gallery of Alabama backstage at the Grand Ole Opry (photo: Larry McCormack/The Tennessean)

But Owen, who will be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in October, still has goals. He desperately wants the band to be inducted into the Grand Ole Opry, which he listened to with his father.

“It’s not about the money, it’s about the music,” he said. “It’s about heritage. It’s about my daddy.”

When Alabama stood on the Opry stage five days after Owen’s mountaintop interview, the crowd jumped on its feet, the years melted away and members performed with the same charisma they had in 1985.

Gentry’s bass line is steady as ever. Cook’s guitar solos punctuate every song. And Owen keeps fans clapping and singing along just as they did when “Song of the South” topped the charts.